Herbert William Knowles
Herbert William Knowles was born about 1899 at Rockburn, a farming settlement in the far south of Quebec, close to the New York line. His father, George Knowles, was born at Rockburn too. His mother, Sarah J. Kelley, was born in Ireland.
In 1904, when Herbert was about five, his father bought a farm at East Roxbury, Vermont, and the family moved across the line. He was a sickly boy. He had been operated on for appendicitis when he was very small, and in July 1907 an ulcer formed in the old wound. He spent several weeks in the hospital at Burlington, and the doctor operated on his side twice more at home that winter.
By 1920 Herbert was farming at Brookfield, Orange County, Vermont. On 9 June 1920, aged twenty-one, he married Gladys Loella Williams, a Brookfield girl not yet eighteen. The Rev. James S. Clark of the Congregational church at Brookfield married them. It was a first marriage for both.
Herbert and Gladys raised a large family on the Brookfield farms. Their son Alfred Williams Knowles was born on 21 March 1922. The 1930 census lists Arthur, Gerald and Alfred in the house. In 1940 Herbert, forty-one, headed a household that held Gladys, Zita, Alfred, Arthur, Gerald, Ramona and Leon. Vermont records name two more children, Ivan George and a Gerald Winston.
In April 1950 Herbert, fifty-one and still married, was living on the farm of his wife's parents, Bert and Rosa Williams, on the Northfield Road north of the post office at Brookfield's Pond Village. The census taker entered him as Bert's son-in-law, working, and born in Canada. With him were two of his children, Zita, seventeen, and Leon, thirteen, entered as Bert's grandchildren. Gladys was not in the house. She later married Donald W. Garfield, and by 1972 she was living at North Augusta, on the Georgia line in South Carolina.
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Cite: Heirology, "Herbert William Knowles (b. 1899)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/herbert-william-knowles-1899-f6b9e5.